A deluge of questions followed in the wake of CEO Jeff Bezos’ announcement on 60 Minutes that Amazon was planning to deliver goods by drone within five years, but could the whole story be one giant public relations hoax in order to boost holiday sales?

That’s the claim being made by radio host Alex Jones, who finds CBS’ helpful promotional pitch for Amazon – the night before Cyber Monday – all too coincidental, asserting that it was a scam to secure hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free advertising.

Calling the idea “unfeasible on so many fronts,” Jones said the scam was designed to get everyone talking about Amazon.com at the height of the holiday shopping season, an example of “product placement” disguised as a news story.

“This is an absolute War of the Worlds level fraud to get everybody talking about drones delivering packages to people’s homes so that everyone talks about Amazon,” said Jones, who accused CBS of approaching Amazon to hatch the plot in return for advertising revenue.

The radio host called on investigative journalists to dig into the premise that the PR stunt was a coordinated hoax from the very outset.

“It’s not meant to be feasible, it’s meant to make you debate it and talk about it and then at a subliminal level then at an overt level you go and leave the watercooler at work and buy a bunch of stuff at Amazon,” said Jones.

Huffington Post and others also noted how the announcement was “timed nicely, and not coincidentally with the ‘Cyber Monday’ online shopping event.”

Innumerable problems that Amazon would have to overcome in order to fully implement the drone delivery program have been identified, with many asserting that the whole idea is completely unfeasible.

– Huge numbers of people who live in major cities (Amazon’s primary target market for drone delivery) live in apartments, meaning there would be nowhere for the drones to land to deliver the goods;

– The packages and the drones themselves could easily be stolen by thieves;

– Drones do not have the technological capability to be aware of their environment, meaning collisions, accidents, injuries, property damage and a flood of lawsuits are almost inevitable;

– Congress is moving aggressively to limit the capability of drones being used for surveillance, which could massively impact any plans Amazon has to fund the project by collecting customer data via its fleet of PrimeAir drones.

All these reasons and more are being cited by those skeptical of Amazon’s ability to pull off the idea, although nobody has dared to suggest that the entire promotional campaign is a manufactured and cynical ploy with no basis in reality.